“If you have an art form that is not accessible … it becomes snobbish and elitist and people aren’t going to be interested. That’s one of the reasons people hate poetry, why it has such a small audience. And that angers me because it takes poetry away from the people.”
–Poet Thomas Lux
At the risk of inflaming many a former English-language major, I think most people do not hate poetry, unless it means only what English literature majors and the literary critics the English literature majors respect say is poetry. Human societies throughout history have held poetry in high esteem, however, and reward poetry’s creators, when the poetry in question has arisen from ordinary people’s lives and imaginations, especially when the poetry is linked to popular and current “people’s” music and dance.
So was Othello ordinary?
The charge is quite correct. About the time we got to Eliot and Pond, the only audience worth writing for was one self-selected for a certain kind of intellectual elite. That a poet should be broadly readable became a fault, and so all poets sought to eradicate poems with a literal level and chose instead he obscure image, the erudite reference, which would exclude non-professionals.
In a sense, the reason wasn’t hard to find. The 19th century had bred a vast array of poets (often women in this case) who thought beautiful meant pretty and sing-song-y. Too much It-takes-a-heap-of-livin-to-make-a-house-a-home, too much bathos and maudlin sentimentality. And Americans have always been strongly anti-intellectual, so that alienating them by one’s intellectuality was a poet’s union card. The result was Wallace Stevens and his generation, Pound’s Cantos, and the like. Even now, Philip Larkin can be utterly unreadable. Se we have a strong bifurcation between the obscure and “in” poets and the merely sentimental pop poets, who are now often connected to pop music one way or another. Bob Dylan is a standard case. He is much praised for his lyrics, but for no apparent reason based on the quality of the writing. This is simply an obvious case in which hoi polloi taste has become synonymous with dumbing down. It wasn’t always that way, however: Hardy could speak – and still does – to highbrow and lowbrow alike, and does Frost and those who are still in their tradition.
But it isn’t just the poets. Go to MOMA, and you will see, as many of you have seen, “art” which is a parody of itself, whose distinguishing characteristic is that it begs to be ridiculed by the non-elite – which has become a sign of its excellence. Music is no different. Listen to John Cage and his ilk, or try to sit through “Of Time and the River” without laughing. (I failed this test incidentally; burst out laughing, and was thrown out.) It is an instructive study in the alienating of the audience to follow Picasso’s “growth” over his lifetime. T he more sure he was that he was a genius (and therefore above the madding crowd), the less he had to say. It is hard to say when the artistic standard – pour epater le bourgeois – became established, but it was clearly a 19th,early 20th century phenomenon – e.g., The Rites of Spring – and it hasn’t run its course yet.
To compare really bad and really good poetry, see the set “Good Poetry and Bad” in Perrine’s Sound and Sense. The maudlin and the genuine experience are side by side.
Anyway, Lux is right. Sheer poetic snobbery is robbing a broad audience of the kind of intense non-verbal pleasure poetry affords. (MacLeish put this non-verbal matter exactly when he write “A poem should be palpable and muste/As a globed fruit,/ Dumb/As old medallions to the thumb….” This is the most accurate description of poetry that I know of.)
By the bye, for whatever it’s worth, I have never heard of Thomas Lux. Larry
Another part of the problem is the fact that poets often call things “poems” that have no rhyme, meter or any other sort of structure other than the visual. Sometimes not even that: see the so-called poem, “Letter to Walt Whitman,” quoted in the article.
It doesn’t have to be doggerel, but I get weary of having prose foisted off on me as “poetry” simply because it’s under one or two hundred words.
That a poet should be broadly readable became a fault, and so all poets sought to eradicate poems with a literal level and chose instead he obscure image, the erudite reference, which would exclude non-professionals.
I would say the pendulum has swung far the other way today – laundry lists and grocery bills are “poems.” Four things I value highly in poetry are 1) that poems touch on things that matter deeply (there is room for lighter verse, but I’m not walking to the bookstore to buy any), 2) that they compact their meaning in images that make that meaning shine forth in many layers, 3) that the language both surprises me and strikes me as memorably apt and 4) that the poems bring me the pleasures of the ear, so that subtle use of meter matters, rhyme not so much. I love poetry, deeply. I haven’t seen much contemporary writing that I would call poetry. I don’t mind if a poem makes me work to get at its meaning – I enjoy it, in fact – but I want there to be something there to work for.
Well written, sherri2. I do not care whether rhyme and traditional meter are present. The are mere vehicles for some poets. I myself require significant form, a term beyond definition, and the intensity of lived experience. I have made this point often, that poetry says what words cannot say, that is, poetry is creates experience, not meaning.
So the MacLeish poem I cited above, “Ars Poetica” concludes, …”A poem should not mean/but be.” This line sums up what poetry must do to make the poem worth the effort. Four lines of Emily Dickenson trumps all the lines of “Howl” as scissor cuts paper. Larry